Re: JDK version popularity

From:

Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 06:35:53 -0700

Message-ID:

<N-GdnRCWA8mliDfWnZ2dnUVZ_uydnZ2d@earthlink.com>

Lew wrote:

Umpteen people agreeing on a guess doesn't make it correct.

Nathan wrote:

Do you agree that two guesses are better than one though?

Of course not. Without facts to at least hint at the truth, two
ignorant guesses are twice as ignorant as one. Is that better?

It all depends on the probability of correctness of the individual guesses.

Consider a yes/no question. If each individual guess is indeed based on
absolutely no facts, so that its probability of being correct is exactly
0.5, a million guesses are no more useful than one guess.

However, I strongly suspect that most people who respond to questions in
this newsgroup have a better than 0.5 chance of being right.

If each individual guess has a probability of correctness that is at
least 0.5+e for some positive number e, then you can achieve any
required probability of correctness by taking a majority vote among
enough guesses.

See "weak learners" and "boosting" for application of this principle to
more complicated cases.

Patricia